README: AI-Generated Images Dataset

Overview:
This dataset accompanies the article "Crafting Synthetic Realities: Examining Visual Realism and Misinformation Potential of Photorealistic AI-Generated Images" (CHI Extended Abstract, 2025). It contains AI-generated images (AIGIs) collected from Instagram and Twitter/X. We made effort to include only photorealistic AIGIs, but due to the diversity and volume of generative outputs, some non-photorealistic images may still be present in the dataset.

Data Collection:
- Instagram: Approximately 28,000 images were collected from 49 publicly accessible Instagram accounts known for posting AI-generated content between July 12, 2022, and August 31, 2023. Accounts were identified through snowball sampling based on news coverage and visual inspection. Image downloading was done using the 4K Stogram tool.
- Twitter: A smaller set of AIGIs (about 2,400 images) was collected from public Twitter/X posts using keyword search and manual verification during the same time period.

Data Files:
- twitter.zip: AIGIs collected from Twitter/X.
- instagram1.zip to instagram6.zip: AIGIs collected from Instagram, split into six zip files to comply with Harvard Dataverse upload limits.

Usage:
These data are provided to support further research on AI-generated media, visual persuasion, and computational aesthetics. Please cite the original paper if using this dataset in any publication or presentation:

Peng, Q., Lu, Y., Peng, Y., Qian, S., Liu, X., & Shen, C. (2025). Crafting Synthetic Realities: Examining Visual Realism and Misinformation Potential of Photorealistic AI-Generated Images. In CHI EA '25: Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Article No. 156, pp. 1–12). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706599.3719834  

Contact:
For questions about this dataset, please contact Qiyao Peng at qiyaopeng@ucsb.edu.
